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>"workers output improved because someone was paying attention to them"

How much did it improve? All this test tells you is that there was some difference, it could be minuscule.

One of the desired outputs of an experiment analysis is an estimate of the size of the treatment effect, typically in the form of a confidence interval. Studies which only report statistical significance (and there are many of them) are of limited utility since you can have a tiny effect that is statistically significant, just as you can have a large effect that is not statistically significant!

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